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FleetLock protocol

This document describes an HTTP-based protocol for orchestrating fleet-wide reboots, used by Zincati. It is modeled after a distributed counting semaphore with recursive locking and lock-ownership.

Overview

The FleetLock protocol is a request-response protocol where operations are always initiated by the client (i.e. Zincati). Each operation consists of a JSON payload sent as a POST request to the server.

At an high level, the client can perform two operations:

  • RecursiveLock: try to reserve (lock) a slot for rebooting
  • UnlockIfHeld: try to release (unlock) a slot that it was previously holding

Semaphore locks are owned, so that only the client that created a lock can release it. All operations are recursive, meaning that multiple unbalanced lock/unlock actions by a client are allowed.

Client state-machine

Clients start off in one of two states based on the system condition: "initialization" or "finalization". There are a number of states between "initialization" and "finalization" as well. In the "initialization" state, the client tries to release any reboot slot it may have previously held. A successful unlock operation means that the client can proceed into its "steady" state and look for further updates. When an update is found and locally staged, the client proceed into its "pre-reboot" state and tries to lock a reboot slot. A successful lock operation means that the client can proceed into its "finalization" state and finalize a pending update, then reboot.

Requests

Endpoints

All endpoints defined below are relative to a common deployment-specific base URL:

  • /v1/pre-reboot: reserve/lock a reboot slot
  • /v1/steady-state: release/unlock a reboot slot

Body

All POST requests contain well-formed JSON body according to the following schema:

  • client_params (object, mandatory)
    • id (string, mandatory, non-empty): client identifier (e.g. node name or UUID)
    • group (string, mandatory, non-empty): reboot-group of the client

Client ID is a case-sensitive textual label that uniquely identifies a lock holder. It is generated and persisted by each client. Client group is a mandatory textual label, conforming to the regexp ^[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+$. This labels can be configured on each client. A server SHOULD check this value and MAY use it to provide multiple reboot buckets (sorting a fleet of nodes into reboot tiers).

By default, Zincati uses the group name "default" unless explicitly configured otherwise.

Headers

Locking and unlocking requests must contain a fleet-lock-protocol header with a fixed value of true to ensure that the actual request was directly intended and not a part of unintentional redirection.

Response

If the operation is succesful, a 200 status code is returned. Every other code is considered as a failed operation.

Example

A client with UUID c988d2509fdf4cdcbed39037c56406fb and group workers can try to acquire a reboot slot from https://example.com/base in a way which is conceptually similar to the following:

Request body:

{
  "client_params": {
    "group": "workers",
    "id": "c988d2509fdf5cdcbed39037c56406fb"
  }
}

POST request:

curl -H "fleet-lock-protocol: true" -d @body.json http://example.com/base/v1/pre-reboot

Errors

Errors on the service endpoints SHOULD be returned to the client as JSON objects, with a 4xx or 5xx HTTP status code. Error values carry a type-identifier and a textual description, according to the following schema:

Key Optional Description
kind required error type identifier, as a non-empty JSON string
value required human-friendly error description, as a non-empty JSON string

This allows clients to show more specific error details to cluster administrators, instead of generic HTTP errors.

For example, an error value like the following could be returned on /v1/pre-reboot when all available slots are already in use:

{
  "kind": "failed_lock_semaphore_full",
  "value": "semaphore currently full, all slots are locked already"
}

Zincati will log this error using the content of value, and it will track the kind label in metrics.

A server MUST ensure that possible values for kind have a bounded/small cardinality.